


Master of Puppets

by messageredacted



Series: The Struggle Within [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-14
Updated: 2012-01-14
Packaged: 2017-10-29 12:44:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/320017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/messageredacted/pseuds/messageredacted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A hunt goes wrong, but Dean knows Sam is coming back to save him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Master of Puppets

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written 5 March 2009.

The first thing he understands is that he’s in bed, but the room smells like the cleaning lady went a little crazy with the antiseptic. They never stay in rooms that smell this clean.

Then he opens his eyes and sees bright white lights, and an IV stand, and when he squints and lifts his hands to rub his eyes, his wrists are pulled up short by handcuffs connected to the bed. He’s in a hospital, and he’s under arrest.

A nurse comes in, sees he’s awake, and steps out of the room again. When she returns, there are two police officers with her. They look very sober. One of them is bald, with a goatee. The other has short red hair. Somehow seeing them makes Dean suddenly remember the sound of the bullet hitting him in the leg, and now that he remembers that he can feel the dull pain underneath layers of painkillers. He had forgotten.

“Dean Winchester,” said the red-headed one. Dean winces slightly. Things are bad if they know his name. “I’m Officer Crutcher. This is Officer Phillips. We have some questions for you.

Dean studies them. The bald one, Phillips, seems coldly angry. The other one, Crutcher, has a neutral expression.

“Where am I?” Dean ventures, trying to sound confused.

“Don’t start that shit with us,” Phillips says, his eyes narrowing. “You know why you’re here. You and your brother murdered that girl in cold blood.”

So they know about Sammy. “Where is he?” Dean asks, turning his attention to Crutcher.

“We’re hoping you can tell us,” Crutcher replies, taking out a note pad from his shirt pocket.

##

Bakersville is a beautiful city in the spring, blooming with flowers, heavily wooded. The air smells sweet. There had been an inordinately high number of animal attacks in the area, and yesterday a man was found dead, attacked by some sort of wild animal.

“Let me guess,” Sam says dryly. “Werewolf.”

“Werewolf,” Dean confirms.

They flip a coin and Dean loses best of two out of three, so he’s the one to go to the morgue while Sam talks to the people who may have seen something.

The medical examiner has her brunette hair in a curly ponytail and she has dimples in her cheeks when she greets him. “FBI, huh? Why are the Feds interested in wild dog attacks?”

Dean smiles and sidles into the room with as much of a James Bond air as he can muster. “That’s classified, ma’am.”

“You can call me Lexie,” she said brightly, and leads him to the body.

It’s pretty gruesome. Dean has seen werewolf attacks before, and this is textbook. Lexie points. “From what I suspect, the dog clamped onto his thigh first and he fell over trying to get it off. Then either he got it off or it let go, because then it went for his throat.”

“You sure it’s a dog?” Dean asks, his eyes sliding to the soft pink seashell of her ear.

“The teeth marks are canine,” Lexie says with a shrug. “And there has been a lot of trouble with wild dogs in the area. I’ve seen one myself.” There is a faint blush rising on her cheeks and he knows that she’s noticed him watching her.

“Big dog?”

She nods once. “Big dog.”

##

Crutcher holds up a picture. It’s glossy and the blood on the wall is cherry red. There isn’t too much of the girl’s face left but below the neck she’s almost perfect, plump breasts peaking over a low cut tank top, a gold cross on a chain around her neck. There is a drip of red down her collarbone, curving over her breast and disappearing between them. It’s more than a little obscene.

“You don’t look surprised,” Phillips says, watching Dean’s expression.

“Am I supposed to know who that is?” Dean says with a shrug. “Looks like that movie, you know? Undead Teenage Cheerleaders from Hell?”

“This is Alexis Davis,” Crutcher says, no inflection in his voice. “She was murdered last night.”

“Alexis Davis,” Dean says. “Isn’t she a singer?”

Phillips looks like he wants to hit Dean. Crutcher says, “She was the chief medical examiner. You two were seen together the night before her death.”

##

Lexie wears a short skirt and high heels when they meet in the bar later that night. She sits on the bar stool and sucks on the olives from her gin martini in a way that’s far hotter than it should be.

Sam’s back in the hotel room so Lexie takes him back to her apartment. She’s got kitschy skulls on shelves, day of the dead skulls, bobble head skulls. It reminds Dean of the hotels he likes to pick out, though so far there’s never been a skull theme.

There’s a cow skull mounted above the bed. They don’t make it out of all of their clothes. Lexie tops, rolling and snapping her hips like she’s riding a bronco, and Dean digs his fingers into her thighs. Afterwards she lies on his chest, panting, and kisses the end of his nose. He slides his hands up under her shirt, feeling her heart beating in her rib cage. There’s an odd mass of bumps on the soft flesh of her stomach. When he touches it, she smiles at him, then sits up. She lifts the edge of her shirt and shows him a mass of nasty looking scars, still pink but healed over.

“Like I said,” she says. “Big dog.”

“You were attacked?” Dean says dumbly, spreading his hand over the scars. His stomach is sinking.

“Last month,” she says, looking down at his hand.

##

Dean wakes up when he hears someone in the doorway. It’s a day later now, and he’s been sleeping like shit in this hospital. Crutcher is in the doorway.

“You believe in werewolves?” Crutcher says.

Dean blinks at him, his mind still struggling to catch up to the present. “Bwah?”

“You were just talking about them in your sleep,” Crutcher says, coming further into the room. “ ‘Kill the werewolves,’” he intones. There’s something in his eyes now that makes Dean think of Phillips. Maybe Crutcher’s not unaffected by this murder. Well, he probably knew the medical examiner too.

“Do you?” Dean asks.

“Believe in werewolves?” Crutcher smiles faintly. “I’m not the one living in a fantasy world here Dean.”

##

They set up surveillance outside of her house. Her apartment is on the second floor. Sam takes a spot by the front entrance, keeping an eye on her windows and the front door. Dean takes the back, watching the fire escape. The full moon is thick and heavy overhead. Lexie’s lights go out at midnight and there is no movement for the rest of the night.

At two, Dean calls Sam. “Nothing yet,” he says.

“We’ll keep watching,” Sam says. “We want to be sure.”

At four, Dean opens his eyes and realizes he’s fallen asleep. Fuck. Still no lights on at Lexie’s, but it doesn’t mean anything.

At sunrise, Sam calls him again. “Let’s go get some breakfast,” he says.

“Sammy, I, uh,” Dean begins.

“You fell asleep?” Sam’s voice is immediately incredulous. “Seriously, Dean?”

“Just for a few minutes,” Dean says, though he doesn’t really know how long it was.

“Fuck,” Sam says. “We have to try again tomorrow night, then.”

##

Crutcher sits down on the chair by the bed, holding a folded newspaper in his hand. His expression is almost pleasant, like he expects to enjoy himself during this conversation. Yeah, this guy is pissed.

“I don’t think you’re the brains of the outfit, Dean,” he says.

Dean shifts slightly in the bed, gets himself comfortable. This isn’t the first time the authorities have tried this tactic. He puts a bland expression on his face. “No?”

“Sammy’s a smart kid, right? Full ride to Stanford, near the top of his class, great prospects for the future until… Well, you showed up.”

“His name’s Sam,” Dean says.

Crutcher’s eyelashes flicker and there is something like amusement on his face, maybe like he just won some points. “Sam, Sammy, whatever. You barely even graduated high school, so I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.”

Dean wants to wipe the smug look off the guy’s face. “Nah, I’m a little slow. Explain it.”

“Your dad was in the Marines, right? Strict military upbringing? Follow every order? Don’t think you’re unique here, Dean. We have profiles of people like you. Your father says jump, you say how high. Your father goes missing, and you run right to your brother because you just don’t know what to do when you aren’t getting orders.”

“Yeah, Sammy’s a real slave driver,” Dean says sarcastically.

“Whose idea was it to kill Lexie?” Crutcher asks.

“Lexie, huh?” Dean drawls. “She must have been a buddy of yours.” Crutcher doesn’t change his expression, so Dean adds, “She ever show you her scars?”

Crutcher shifts slightly, then stills. Dean smiles.

##

The diner has a television hanging from the ceiling. Dean eats his scrambled eggs and watches it over Sam’s shoulder. Sam is slouching in his seat, staring at his laptop screen.

“Wild dog attack last night,” Dean says in a low voice. Sam crunches into a piece of buttered toast and looks over his shoulder at the television too.

“Did they say what time?”

“Nope.”

Sam turns back to his laptop and starts typing, leaving the toast hanging from his mouth. After a minute he takes hold of the toast again. “Four a.m. A guy getting off the late shift. He’s in the hospital. What time did you fall asleep?”

Dean swallows some coffee and meets Sam’s gaze without answering. Sam swears softly.

“We have to kill her tonight.”

“I want to make sure first,” Dean says.

Sam’s forehead pinches slightly. “So this one can’t be a werewolf because _you_ like her?”

“The fuck’s that supposed to mean?” Dean snaps. “You know Madison was a werewolf.”

“You just seem a little eager to break the rules when it’s someone _you’ve_ slept with.” Sam returns with just as much antagonism.

“Yeah, so I like her, okay? You think that means anything if she really one? I just want to be sure. With Madison, we made sure, didn’t we? We both saw her change.”

After a tense pause, Sam seems to sag a little.

“Yeah,” he says doubtfully.

“We don’t know it’s her,” Dean insists, keeping his voice low. The diner is mostly empty and the waitress is at the other end of the room, filling someone’s coffee cup. “We never saw her leave the house, and yeah I know that’s partly my fault but we need to know if it’s not her.”

Sam sighs. He looks down at his plate. “Fine,” he says after a moment. “We’ll give it another night.”

##

“You know, Dean, I know you like to think that you’re the dominant one in the relationship,” Crutcher says, his hands resting on the newspaper folded in his lap. “But I don’t think that’s really the case. I think all Sam needs to do is ask his big brother to do something and you do it.”

“I think you’re talking out your ass because you don’t know the first thing about it,” Dean responds immediately, before he can stop himself.

Crutcher smiles. “We’ve been talking to some people who know you. We’ve been looking for you guys for a while, you know. You’ve been leaving a trail of destruction wherever you go.”

“People like who?” Dean says in disgust.

“Michelle Montgomery. Rebecca Warren. Jessica Moore. Remember them?”

Dean blinks. “Jessica Moore is dead.”

Crutcher raises one eyebrow. “Are you talking about the fire in her apartment, where you left her to die? No, she survived that, no thanks to you and Sam.”

Dean opens his mouth and closes it. Jess is dead. He knows she’s dead. The yellow eyed-demon got her. She couldn’t have escaped that.

“You look surprised,” Crutcher observes. He takes his phone out of his pocket. “You want to call her? I don’t have her number with me but I have it on file back at the station. She had quite a few interesting things to tell us. Said that Sam told her you and your father were delusional. That you believed in ghosts and vampires and…werewolves. He was afraid you were going to suck him into your delusion.”

“Sammy wouldn’t say that,” Dean said, his voice low and tight.

“You sucked him in all right, didn’t you? You came running back to him looking for someone to boss you around and you dragged him right back into the delusion. He left his whole perfect life behind for you. And you want to know something?” Crutcher leans forward in his chair. His eyes are alive with intensity now. He is almost smiling. “I think he woke up again and realized what sort of bullshit you’d been feeding him. I think he decided that he doesn’t need your brand of crazy anymore. I don’t think he’ll be coming back for you at all.”

“You can bite me, okay?” Dean snaps. He presses his lips firmly together. He’s not going to talk to this fucking cop any more. Screw that. Sam will be waiting for him.

Crutcher sits back in his chair again, looking pleased with Dean’s reaction. He glances down at the newspaper as if he just remembered that it was there. He unfolds it and holds it up.

“They caught the dog this morning that has been terrorizing people,” he says. There’s a picture of a dead dog on the front page, with an animal control officer standing next to it. “Its teeth mark matched the ones found on the victims. Turns out it had rabies.” He tosses the newspaper onto Dean’s lap and stands up. “I’ll see you later.” He heads to the door.

Dean looks down at the newspaper on his lap. The dog has massive teeth and its tongue is lolling out. Big fucking dog.

Crutcher pauses at the doorway and then half turns back. “You think Sam is coming back for you, don’t you?” he asks.

Dean doesn’t answer, keeps his eyes down on the paper. Of course Sammy is coming back for him.

“Dean, who do you think called the police?”

When Dean looks up, Crutcher is gone.

##

Dean’s coming out of the shower with a towel on when he notices Sam sitting on the edge of the bed, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Headache?” Dean asks, heading over to his packed clothes.

“Vision,” Sam grinds out. His eyes are fixed on Dean.

Dean stops. “Werewolf?”

Sam lowers his hand from his face. “I saw her, Dean. I saw Lexie changing into a wolf. She ripped a woman to pieces. It’s going to happen tonight.”

Dean pauses a moment, letting it sink in. He sighs. “So she is a wolf.”

“We have to stop her. The things I saw her do… We have to stop it.”

Dean squats down at his pack and pulls on some clothes. “Okay,” he says hollowly. “We’ll do it.”

“Now,” Sam says. “It’s only two hours before sunset.”

Dean finishes dressing and they head to the car. Dean doesn’t talk the whole way to the apartment. Sam doesn’t seem to want to push him.

Sam pulls the car into a spot across the street and parks it. He turns to Dean.

“You want me to do it for you?”

Dean’s mind flashes to Madison, to Dean asking the same question of Sam.

“No,” he says resolutely. “I can do it.”

Sam nods. “I’ll meet you at the fire escape.”

He gets out of the car and gets a shotgun from the trunk. There are lights on in Lexie’s windows. It’s late enough that she’s home from work. Maybe making dinner. Maybe getting ready for a night on the town. He walks up the front walk.

Her voice comes out of the call box when he hits the buzzer. “Hello?”

“Lexie, it’s Dean.”

A pause, and then the door clicks. He comes inside, keeping the shotgun flat against his thigh. He climbs the stairs.

She has the door open when he gets there. He keeps the gun out of her line of sight.

“Hey,” she says, smiling. She’s wearing a tank top with a rhinestone skull on it, and a pair of skintight jeans. Fuck, she’s hot.

“Hi there,” Dean said, faintly echoing her smile.

“What’s up?”

He shrugs. “Just thought you might be off work.”

“I am indeed. I was just cleaning up from dinner. Come in.” She turns away from him, leaving the door open, and heads back into the kitchen.

He comes into the apartment and shuts the door behind himself. She closes the door to the dishwasher and thumbs it on. He stands in the doorway of the kitchen and watches her.

“I didn’t think I’d be seeing you again,” Lexie says, a note of something wistful in her voice when she turns back to him.

“I just couldn’t stay away,” Dean says. For once, he hates the way his body is responding to her. It’s a little obscene, considering what he’s going to do. It doesn’t help matters when she steps to him, leaning against his chest, her breasts pushed up against him, and kisses him.

He returns the kiss with heat. She breaks it, laughing. “Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just—” She stops suddenly.

“Lexie,” Dean says.

She steps back away from him, staring at the shotgun that he’s holding at his thigh. “What—” Her eyes are wide.

He doesn’t have anything to say to her, nothing that will make this better. There isn’t time to convince her that she’s a werewolf. What will the proof be? If he doesn’t do this now, she’ll kill someone tonight.

He raises the gun.

He expects her to flee but Lexie surprises him, shoving herself against him, forcing his hand and the gun down. The gun goes off and Dean chokes back a sound as the bullet grazes his leg, tearing through his pants. Lexie jams her elbow into his diaphragm and then she’s off running towards the door. Dean can’t drag air into his lungs but he can’t screw this up. He flings out a hand, grabs her arm and drags her back, yanking her to the floor. She screams at the top of her lungs, kicking at him.

The gun roars again and Dean has to flinch back at the sight even though it’s not the worst thing he’s ever seen. Lexie’s body slumps and finally Dean can drag air into his lungs again. In the ringing silence he suddenly hears sirens approaching. Someone must have called the cops, but he didn’t expect them this fast.

Dean gets to his feet. His leg is pouring blood and the bone might be cracked, but he forces himself up anyway, leaning heavily against the wall, his gorge rising. If he can make it to the fire escape, Sam will be waiting.


End file.
